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Purpose – This chapter reflects on the interpretation and effects of the term intersectionality within the academy and across a broad spectrum of institutional and grassroots environments in which it is operationalized and deployed.

Design/methodology/approach – Based on the authors’ experiences within the academy and their respective participation as researchers and organizers within feminist, queer, and racial and economic justice movements, the chapter surveys the rhetorical, political, and organizational uses of intersectionality across these realms.

Findings – Five general challenges to intersectional practice are identified and described: misidentification, appropriation, institutionalization, reification, and operationalization. The authors trace these challenges across the academy, grassroots movements, and nonprofit organizations.

Originality/value – Offers a new articulation of intersectional practice as the application of scholarly or social movement methodologies aimed at intersectional and sustainable social justice outcomes.

A question of size THE Committee set up by the Minister of Education in 1957 to “consider the structure of the public library service in England and Wales, and to advise what changes, if any, should be made n the administrative arrangements, regard being had to the relation of public libraries to other libraries,” was the first such since the Kenyon Committee which reported in 1927. One of the most controversial aspects of the Roberts Committee's deliberations was the consideration of the minimum size (in terms of population) of an independent library system.

ON MAY 1ST, 1766, diligent newspaper readers, perusing the front pages of their favourite journals over breakfast, noticed a brief announcement amongst the plethora of advertisements for miracle cures and infallible nostrums. It read: ‘This day is published: elegantly printed on fine medium writing‐paper, in quarto, price five shilings, The New Bath Guide: or Memoirs of the B—n—r—d family. In a series of poetical epistles … Sold by J. Dodsley in Pall Mall’.

The literary world is an elitist enclave, where anti‐marketing rhetoric is regularly encountered. This paper aims to show that the book trade has always been hard‐nosed and commercially driven.

This paper is less a review of the literature, or a theoretical treatise, than a selective revelation of the commercial realities of the book business.

The paper shows that the cultural industries in general and the book business in particular were crucibles of marketing practice long before learned scholars started taking notice. It highlights the importance of luck, perseverance and, not least, marketing nous in the “manufacture” of international bestsellers.

By highlighting humankind's deep‐seated love of narrative – its clear preference for fiction over fact – this paper suggests that marketing scholars should reconsider their preferred mode of research representation. Hard facts are all very well, but they are less palatable than good stories, well told.

The paper makes no claim to originality. It recovers what we already know but appear to have forgotten in our non‐stop pursuit of scientific respectability.